I’ve just had a few notifications about 'national moth week" where INat powers seemed to make big statements about the massive efforts of observers. Let’s then preface what i next say, that’s awesome, a massive user-base with interest in these creatures.
In this context then i absolutely despair about the curatorial efforts for Lepidoptera in general, but here let’s look past what often seems chaos for Papilionoidea and focus on the largely small brown ones. There’s a few curators who have added massive value to those, others who make sporadic efforts. [EDIT: Thanks to all.
My point though, is that even with that, Lepidoptera account for about half the unresolved flagged taxonomic issues for arthropods (and for scale they represent only about 13% of described arthropod diversity from species counts).]
I’ll admit, many of the pretty diurnal ones have much taxonomic complexity, but please, please … some others can be better updated, no?
Here then today i just made a taxon swap for a query issue made four years ago with no answer from any curator. [EDIT: I’m dismayed by a continued lack of curation effort on some rather easily resolvable tasks]. After this ‘national moth week’ is finally over, can some of you moth lovers PLEASE fix some of these outstanding flagged taxonomic issues!?
If you think you might be able to help as a curator, I would encourage you to apply! Definitely would be valuable to have that specific expertise, and you often give helpful comments to others here on the forum (which bodes well):
I did a taxon swap to resolve a Lepidoptera flag once, but then some of the butterfly people got mad at me since no one agrees on Lepidoptera taxonomy. That was my only foray into curating Lepidoptera and I’m not inclined to try it again. Unfortunately the problems with Lepidoptera taxonomy seem deeper than iNaturalist.
Oh if I apply to become a curator I’m not touching butterflies. Those people have opinions. lol But the little brown moths are both what I find more interesting and where there’s a lot less drama.
@ paul_dennehy
Any steps towards becoming a curator? If you did, you can limit your activity however you choose, even just adding updates to the US “little brown moths” to keep that aligned with updates on MPG would be welcome!
Considering that the Lep world has carved out their own general rebellion against the ICZN gender rules, this is a pretty fair statement. Some things just don’t fly with butterfly people. ;-)
And yeah, this moderation action seemed way overblown.
If willing, this could now become a productive discussion about where “Lepidoptera taxonomy” is getting things wrong or even right.
Sorry that i didn’t reply before to @zygy, i think we both come from shared perspective of spider-esque things where for about 50K species there’s been a single authoritative source catalog for entire lineage since the 1920, under various leadership. For me, it was eye-opening to then increasingly learn about how leaders in other taxonomic groups have been cataloging their taxa and bringing those into the electronic age.
For the concerns by @zygy, i don’t think “butterflies” are reflective of Lepidoptera as a whole, so complexity surrounding just seven or so families of mostly day-flying “pretty” ones do indeed seem to regularly add much debate and so many conflicting viewpoints, but diversity wise, they’re only like 10% of the order. Absolutely then, the many opinions on those few then feed into iNat flags etc, but even without those the remaining 90% still cause so many flagged issues - daily, repeatedly.
@tristanmcknight It’s an interesting point on the “ICZN rebellion” and something worthy of further discussion, Entirely anecdotally - i’m “winging it” to contunue the lovely puns - then i find the rebel lepidopterist view to follow original spelling practically sooooo so much easier than digging into “what’s the grammatical gender of this genus” and “is this species name gender modifiable or not” etc. I used to be dismayed by their discord, but after repeatedly taking on task to update many name-lists (i.e. leps with discord, others with compliance) nowadays i’m completely on their team as “forget ICZN gender agreement as archaic, convoluted and awful for stability”. I think Lepidoptera taxonomy has a billion problems where they make their own system worse, but i don’t think that discord with ICZN is one of them, quite the opposite!
Yes, I actually agree. And I think that in a few decades all other animals will also be in that paradigm of just continuing the original string of letters regardless of what the fake Latin should have been every time there’s an split. I think the internet age is accelerating that-- just see how poorly iNat’s databases handle gender agreement updates (with clunky taxon swaps until the recent loosening) as an illustration.
That said, I don’t really have expertise with Leps, just flies, so I don’t have much of anything else productive to add and can only wish you good fortune.
One thing to consider is whether other major data partners share this view. For example, if GBIF insists that ICZN (and the botanical equivalent) always be followed in their nomenclature, rebellion on iNat may increasingly lead to data disconnects with GBIF and its other partners and data users.
Archaic hassle though it is, having a single spelling/gender rule that everyone follows does help keep everyone on the same page (literally), and thereby does ultimately contribute to stability. If ICZN and everyone agreed to dump the rule, that could work equally well (after a period of instability as the change was implemented). But having different factions doing different things at the same time doesn’t seem helpful to anyone.
Fake Latin needs a gender-fluid they / them option for the binomial.
Or ‘prefer not to say’ as the default.
Beyond the ivory tower barrier, I cannot see a good reason to tweak the sp name backwards and forwards as the taxonomy unravels. Then stabilises.
Someone once told me that the neuter cases in Latin are typically the same as the male cases (-um, -i), but I don’t know if that’s true. If so, defaulting to the neuter would unfortunately be the same as defaulting to the male.
Grammatical gender is most relevant for adjectival epithets (the bulk of them), where the ending must be changed to agree with the gender of the genus, a noun. Trying to match grammatical gender to the sex of an individual only becomes relevant for adjectival epithets honoring the individual. The Madrid Code (current for botany) only provides rules for masculine and feminine genitive inflections, but one could compose an epithet inflected for the neuter genitive and it would be legitimate under the Code, just arbitrarily composed. In any case, the neuter genitives do indeed take the same form as the masculine genitives.
I confess as a botanist I’m always a bit bemused by the demands to abandon grammar in binomials. Admittedly the number of species covered by the botanical Code is somewhat smaller (by less than an order of magnitude) and perhaps we have more genera composed from classical roots whose grammatical gender is easy to assign. But in a world where Lepindex and similar databases exist, it’s hard to see why the gender of a genus can’t be catalogued as well.